Chapter Nineteen

“I love this guy,” Georgia gestured to the television with the remote control she had commandeered upon entering the room. She was watching QVC. “David Venable,” she added dreamily. “His voice is practically hypnotic.”

His voice was nice, Willow had to admit. Otherwise he looked pretty ordinary. He was talking about a Chalcedony ring. It was a square cut stone flanked by open galleries set with diamonds. It looked pretty and feminine in his fingers as he turned it in the studio lights.

After her post breakfast nap of sheer exhaustion, what appeared to be a bell hop, or a freakishly short person with a snout and stubby horns in a bell hop uniform, dropped off clothing for her. Willow was wearing a pair of black cargo pants that were too large in the waist until she discovered two small tabs that allowed her to cinch the waist tighter. They were still too long, bunching around her ankles. She wore the pants with a greenish gray tie-dyed t-shirt delivered with the pants. No underwear, but she was no longer stuck in a robe. She was still barefoot. Once she was dressed and had had another cup of yogurt for lunch, Spike had parked her in what appeared to be a lounge with Georgia for company.

He had gone out, probably to find a meal.

There were books in the lounge. She had picked up a copy of Robert Massie’s biography of Peter the Great to read, but she was having a hard time concentrating on it. Colin was sitting on the couch, with his feet up. She could feel him watching her. More than once she had looked up to catch him at it, though he hadn’t seemed disturbed by being caught, and she had been the one to look away.

She hadn’t seen Harmony or any of the other vampires other than Pete, and she still had no idea where they were. There was a pad of stationery on a desk with a green glass banker’s lamp positioned at one end of the room. There was an embossed crest, blood red against heavy cream colored paper, and a single word, Hermitage, printed in parallel with the crest. They could have been anywhere.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Georgia glanced at her, momentarily diverted from her viewing. “Does it matter?” she asked.

“Sacramento,” Colin answered Willow. “No. She can’t get out of here. The elevators are key locked,” he told Georgia.

Willow filed that away. She had seen the outside of the door of the room she occupied with Spike. It had a credit card type key lock mechanism. She would need to find one of the keys if she was going to get out of there. Thank you, Colin for the helpful escape tip.

She went back to pretending to read her book.

Georgia walked over to her. Willow was sitting in an oversize armchair covered in a tapestry fabric. She sat on the arm of the chair, tilting her head to look at the cover of the book. “Looks boring,” Georgia commented. She picked up a lock of Willow’s hair and played with it idly, her eyes drifting over the more threatening elements of décor.

Willow tried to ignore her.

“What did you and Spike do?” Georgia asked, a small, knowing smile playing on her lips.

“Nothing I’m planning to talk about,” Willow said. Ever, she added to herself.

Georgia chuckled. “Discreet,” she teased. “A mortal who survived being William the Bloody’s bedmate,” she looked at Colin. “Your Mum would pay a fortune for her,” she said.

Colin’s mother ran a brothel and prided herself on satisfying a wide variety of tastes ranging from the exotic to the banal. Willow was in the later category. She couldn’t absorb the damage that a vampire, were, or some of the humanoid variants of demons could. She was just mortal, more pretty than beautiful, and she had a footnote to her recent history that made her intriguing. Spike wasn’t known for leaving survivors. Colin had been thinking along those lines. He acknowledged it with a small nod of agreement.

Willow wasn’t sure what they were talking about. Well, she had an idea, and she was equally certain that she didn’t want it confirmed. Georgia cupped her chin, forcing her head back. She leaned over, breathing in. Smelling her. She leaned over, rubbing her lips over Willow’s. She felt the same little shock that had plucked at her insides the first time Georgia had kissed her. Her lips were so soft. Georgia’s thumb rubbed in circles on her jaw. “Open your mouth for me,” she whispered against Willow’s lips.

She frowned, glaring at the vampire, feeling acutely uncomfortable.

Georgia lifted her head, meeting her eyes. Gold flashed for an instant so fleeting that Willow might have imagined it. She found herself searching Georgia’s blue-gray eyes for it, her mind going blank. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.

Colin watched with interest. Thrall. He could see the girl resisting the pull of it.

“Open your mouth, baby,” Georgia crooned.

Her lips parted. Georgia slid down in the seat with her, pushing the book out of Willow’s grip. “That’s my good girl,” she crooned, sliding her arm around the girl’s shoulders. She kissed her hungrily, nibbling on her slack lips, one hand cupping her unbound breast, supporting the weight of it in her palm. Her tongue slid inside the warmth of her mouth, caressing her tongue, coaxing it out to play. “Come on, baby, kiss me back,” she encouraged.

Colin saw the girl blink. She was already starting to shake it off. Her hands curled into fists, driving her fingernails into her palms and she stiffened up, awareness returning. That, in itself, was impressive. He had seen mortals drained to death without ever breaking the hold a thrall had on them. Georgia didn’t have that kind of power. Willow would have bolted out of the chair if Georgia hadn’t read the change in her posture fast enough and thrown a long leg over the girl’s lower body to keep her in place.

“Please don’t,” she gritted out, sounding confused and furious.

Georgia tried to catch her eyes, but Willow seemed to be on to that trick and averted her gaze, unselfconsciously submissive. She was breathing hard, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Georgia’s thumb circled her nipple through the t-shirt. She rubbed her cheek against the girl’s hair, making a purring sound. “You smell delicious,” she said. “You smell like honeysuckle and Spike. He fucked you, didn’t he? Did you like it? Did it make you come?”

Hot color rose in her cheeks and her eyes brightened with tears and anger. “No, I didn’t like it,” she said in a tone that was full of resentment.

“But it made you come, anyway,” Georgia guessed. She laughed softly, kissing her temple, feeling a vein throb against her lips. “That’s my sweet girl. Everything naughty and nice all in one pretty package.”

Willow felt the hand on her breast move down, swiftly, between her legs, rubbing her almost roughly. The seam of the cargo pants was rubbed against her clitoris as the heel of Georgia’s hand massaged her. She squirmed, trying to close her legs against the intrusion. She looked across the room to see Colin calmly watching them. For some reason she wasn’t afraid of him.

Georgia saw her looking at Colin. “He likes to watch,” she explained with a grin. “Don’t you, sugar?”

Colin’s eyebrows rose. His beautiful golden girl getting it on with another girl. He felt nostalgic, remembering the first time he had seen her, bent over a gaudy fuchsia colored costume that she was tacking netting to for a production of ‘As You Like It’. Frustrated not so much by the boring task as at the realization that she wasn’t going to be the girl in the dress, on the stage, saying the lines, and getting the applause. He had known instantly that he was going to assign her a staring role in his life.

What was not to like in watching her? He sought and found no corresponding attraction to the girl Georgia was toying with. That might change in time. In a way he was relieved. If Georgia had her way about it, the girl was going to be with them for a long time. When she was newly turned, she would occupy a large share of Georgia’s attention, but Georgia was his childe, and nothing could come between them. She would remain in the place he assigned her, and she had chosen a girl, not unlike the one he had chosen. There was, in Willow, a hint of longing to be the center of someone’s attention that reminded him of Georgia.

“Watching you is what I do,” he said comfortably.

“Aside from killing people,” Willow muttered, as much for her benefit as theirs. I am a food group to them, she chanted in her head.

Colin yawned. “Uh, huh, aside from that,” he agreed. He looked almost kind. “It's okay, Willow, isn’t it? We know we kill people, and since we aren’t people, and people are the best to eat, that’s okay with us. You aren’t going to offend a vampire by reminding them that they kill people.”

“I’m people. It offends me,” she asserted.

“Does it, now?” Colin looked thoughtful. “Because, you are special, seeing as how you aren’t dead, nor worse off. Coddled and petted, as you are. You aren’t the first human a vampire has kept around because they are useful. I wonder how much fight you’d have left in you if you were drained of a pint regularly, kept on a less generous diet, and only allowed the privilege of sleeping in a bed after you had shown yourself to be trustworthy and accommodating. Or if you had been used in ways that a vampire would enjoy with all the consideration that a nice spot of pain and fear would warrant. Half the fun of something as tender and soft as you is breaking the skin slowly,” he grinned. “Sort of like nibbling the chocolate off a candy bar to make it last longer?”

Willow, who preferred candy bars given to that kind of disassembly, shuddered at the mental image and wondered if what she heard in Colin’s voice was disapproval.

Georgia nuzzled her neck, taking in a deep breath through her nose. “You are special,” she said, licking Willow’s neck. “You smell delicious,” she breathed.

Colin knew that an equal part of what drew Georgia to the girl was the way Spike treated her. By not abusing her or allowing her to be abused, he had in effect raised her status. On her own merits, the girl wasn’t that extraordinary. She was just an eighteen year old girl who was relatively smart, resourceful, and a bit more knowledgeable about vampires than most humans. Pretty enough, but not the sort of girl who would have ever been turned for her looks alone, like Harmony. She would be a handful if it came to that, he realized. Not for the first time, he regretted having gotten involved with Spike and one of his crazy schemes.

On the other hand, he imagined introducing his mum to his grand-childe. She routinely dismissed Georgia as a bit of fluff, but if she had really disliked her, she would have staked her without a second thought. She wasn’t the sort who got caught up in the idea of establishing a bloodline or any other silly vampire snobberies. She was a good deal more pragmatic than that, but she liked strong, smart women. He had a feeling that she would get a kick out of the redheaded girl who even now was stubbornly refusing to give in to Georgia’s playful petting.



Sacramento was a little off the beaten trail for Spike. He snacked on a warm little morsel of a chubby brunette spiced with Sambucca chosen for her connection to a roomy late model Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows. He drove around in his new ride for a while, buying a carton of cigarettes, bottled water, and a pre-packaged salad with the cash from the dead girl’s purse. The credit cards would be passed on to Georgia to use.

The part of town where the hotel was located was nice. Cobblestone streets, turn of the century Victorian buildings, lots of boutiques and the odd sidewalk café. The Sacramento River was a comfortable walk away and there was a pier. Unlike a lot of American cities, the downtown area wasn’t deserted after dark, which made it good hunting territory.

He drove the car back to the hotel and found the room he shared with Red empty. The bed had been remade with fresh linens. He went in search of Georgia, finding her with Colin and Red in the lounge that connected to their room. They looked very cozy and domestic. Colin was on the couch with Georgia curled up beside him. Red was on the floor, on the other side of the coffee table, playing backgammon with Colin. The musky undertone of arousal reached him before he even opened the door. Georgia turned her head when he came in and graced him with a smile.

He looked at Red. She looked okay.

Georgia stroked Colin’s thigh. “Dinner time?” she suggested.

“Let me finish this,” Colin said of the game.

Spike tossed Georgia the purse he was carrying. “New car and credit cards,” he told her.

Georgia opened her purse and rummaged through it. Distracted, Willow stared at the discarded contents of an undoubtedly dead person’s life until Colin snapped his fingers at her. “Your move, Willow,” he reminded her.

She rolled her dice and stared blindly at the board, trying to make sense of the game. She had to recheck her roll twice before it sunk in. It was a good roll. Useful. She could fill in her points and box Colin out to go for the win. Except maybe that wasn’t a good idea given that he was a vampire and probably didn’t like loosing. Her hand hovered for a moment. So what if he didn’t? What was he going to do? Torture her? She filled in, and sent one of his unprotected pieces to the center of the board.

He grunted. “That was quick,” he commented. “Game over. Let’s go eat,” he rose from the couch, reaching for Georgia who slid her fingers into his hand and wrapped her free hand around his thick wrist, letting him pull her to her feet.

Willow winced. She was an idiot. She could have drawn the game out more. Not that it would really change the outcome. They were going out to kill people now or later.

“Want to come with?” Georgia asked her, letting go of Colin’s wrist to run her fingers through Willow’s hair. “We’ll do a little after hours shopping.”

“Maybe another time,” Spike declined on her behalf, while Willow was working out the likelihood of getting away from Colin and Georgia versus the strong probability that she would be forced to watch them kill.

Georgia and Colin left and Spike walked around the side of the couch and sat down across from her. He started setting the backgammon board up for a new game. He looked over at Willow seeing the stubborn set to her mouth and defiance in her eyes. He licked the last traces of blood off his lower lip and grinned.

“You’re just dying to tell me that you aren’t going to play board games with my bad self, aren’t you?”

She nodded slowly, a flash of uncertainty appearing. She looked over at her abandoned Robert Massie biography of Peter the Great. “I was reading. I’ll go back to that,” she kept her tone studiously neutral. No ‘please’ voiced or implied.

She was, he realized, avoiding his eyes. What was that about? “Red? What’s got your nose out of joint?”

She uncurled herself from the floor and walked over to the armchair, sitting in it and tucking one foot under her thigh as she picked up the book. “You want the short list?” she asked.

He waved one hand in a circular motion, “Kidnapped, deprived of your book list, and the doing of good deeds,” he paraphrased an earlier rant on the subject. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

“No,” she replied curtly. “I’m fed and watered at regular intervals.”

He leaned back into the couch. “And petted. Someone ruffle your fur in the wrong direction?”

There was a wealth of meaning in that question. Willow gritted her teeth and stared doggedly at page 22 of her book. It was a big, heavy book and the subject matter was sufficiently outside of her general knowledge that she had to concentrate on it to understand what it was about. The author was giving a brief history of Imperial Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church, the boyars, the court during Peter the Great’s minority, and its relationship with Western Europe. Loosing herself in books was one of her unheralded talents. It was one of the reasons that she was a good researcher. No matter how terrible the threat, she could hit the books and relax enough to get sufficiently lost in the subject matter to find the weird sixth gear in her mind that sifted and sorted through facts with the analytical efficiency of a computer.

“Georgia did something to me,” she said, addressing the book.

Splotchy color appeared in her cheeks. Her lips were compressed in a thin line. Anger, embarrassment, and fear competed for a hold on her. He rolled his eyes. Georgia did something to her? He smirked. “Damn. What did I miss?” he asked.

Her lip curled. That figured. He would think it was funny or titillating. “She did something that made me feel like . . . I couldn’t . . . make myself do anything but what she told me to do.”

Spike’s eyes narrowed. “Be specific, Red,” he ordered.

She looked up from the book, but not directly at him. “Like I was trapped inside my head,” she elaborated. “And, I couldn’t make myself stop doing what she told me to do.” She shuddered at the unpleasant memory.

Thrall? Georgia, you cheater, he thought with a barely suppressed grin. “How long did it last?” he queried, curious about how far she had taken it.

“Long enough,” Willow was creeped out. She wished she hadn’t brought it up. They had enough weapons already. Last night it was alcohol, exhaustion, and the threat of violence. Add to that some freaky hypnotism thing and she was outclassed again.

He got up from the couch and walked over to her. He forced her to look at him by cupping her face in her hands and holding her head still when she tried to jerk her head away. He studied her eyes until she hastily squeezed them shut.

He snorted. “Open your eyes, Red. I’m not going to hurt you,”

“Uh-uh,” her face pinched as she shook her head. “No way,” she said. “That’s what she did.”

“Well, I’m not going to do that,” he told her. “No point in it. I might handcuff you to the bed and shag you rotten for fun—“

Her eyes flew open, outraged. He was laughing!

He avoided the foot that lashed out, chuckling. “Knock it off, Red. I didn’t come over here to play,” he commented, studying her eyes. Her pupils were reacting normally to light, he decided. He let go of her and walked over to the sideboard to investigate the bar.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked, pouring a glass of whiskey. It was an expensive, small batch, Kentucky bourbon. Sometime in the early 80s he and Dru had gone to Kentucky for the Derby. Dru had a hat she wanted to show off, and the city was lousy with drunk tourists. The night before the race they had wandered through the streets around the track, closed to traffic, full of people out to enjoy a street party, blissfully unaware of the menace that walked amongst them.

He remembered singling out a redheaded girl sitting on the curb. Not as pretty as his Red, but a lot more adventurous given the way she had looked up at him like he was something extra delicious that she wanted to get a taste of. She had been drinking lemonade, the kind made at fairs all across America, with a half of a lemon, a fourth of a cup of sugar, and water, shaken up in a plastic cup. Spiked with cheap whiskey from a bottle she had in her purse. There had been an older girl, probably her sister, who had found them chatting and pulled her away with a sharp word and an angry glare, seeking the safety of the crowded street.

Handcuffs, sex, blood play. It was all starting to sound appealing, but it was early. Plenty of time for that later. No one was going to show up and save Willow from him.

Willow watched him warily for a moment. Right. She was going to drink with Spike? Not likely. “No thank you,” she answered, going for vehement and hearing it spoiled by her inclination to be conciliatory.

“Are you sure?” he asked, just to mess with her. “It’ll loosen you up.”

The look she shot him was deadly. “Not just no, but hell no, sums it up,” she said. “I do not intend to loosen up around you ever again.”

Her hand went to her throat, a nervous gesture, or a deliberate reminder of the threat he posed to her? She was wound up tight tonight. Boredom had something to do with it. She had endured nearly two weeks of confinement. She was also in a state of deep denial about what the change in their relationship meant. She was determined to treat it as an aberration. A one-time thing that could be avoided. Kidnapping wasn’t exactly a form of entertainment for him. Well, there was the spot of emotional torment inflicted on the Watcher and the Poof that amused. She had made it more interesting with a few escape attempts that had been countered. Otherwise, it was a dull business, and he wasn’t about to give up his newfound game of seduction and sex.

His mind wandered back to their early morning shag. He had held back. That had been interesting. She hadn’t been up to it. Passivity in his lovers didn’t excite him, but the silent battle with her passivity and stubbornness in the balance had piqued his interest, and the slow shag had built into an orgasm that had been pleasantly intense, spiced with her weary capitulation. Angelus had brought home countless humans to keep around as pets back in the day. He and Darla would literally fuck them to death. It hadn’t interested Spike. Drusilla had brought home men and women, using her gift to disappear for a few hours inside their deepest desires. It always ended in death for the victim.

He couldn’t kill Red. Not yet. That created a challenge.

“So, we can skip the boring preliminaries?” he smiled crookedly.

He was stuck with babysitting his captive. Board games didn’t appeal. Watching her read didn’t interest him. She might have held him off with a decent conversation, but she was too pissed off to talk to him. That left him to circle back to hand cuffs, sex, and blood play. The whiskey and the fresh kill warmed him.

Willow felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle. She kept her gaze trained on the book. “Less than six months ago I dusted a vampire with a pencil,” she said, keeping her voice as even and steady as possible.

“A pencil?” Spike’s eyebrows rose. She was, he decided, trying to make a point. The unwitting pun in his mind made him grin.

“From a drawer, across a room,” she looked up briefly.

He poured more whiskey, giving her a sideways glance, wondering where she was going with this.

“You need me alive to make your trade,” she pointed out. “I don’t need you alive for much of anything.”

She was too new to this to make an effective threat. There was a fine thread of uncertainty that trembled in her voice, and she was afraid. It was her bad luck that he knew it.

“Wrong,” he said, mocking her. “Georgia and Colin don’t know what I’m trading you for. They could care less. Do you think they are going to let you go? Colin would drain you in a second, but Georgia? She wants to keep you around, pet. The only road home is through me, Red.”

Her forehead tightened as she processed this information, blinking several times, her stare hovering in the middle distance above the pages of the book she was pretending to read. As usual, he seemed to have the upper hand, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she had just given up a strategic advantage. Her best defense was appearing defenseless. That had always been true. She had extremely limited options when it came to going up against vampires. She lacked the reflexes, speed, stamina, and strength that Buffy had. She had given up any element of surprise that she might have had, if Spike took what she implied seriously, and it was impossible to tell if he had.

She looked up from her book. “I’m eighteen years old and I’ve been doing this for four years, Spike, on the Hellmouth. I’m still alive, unlike you, and you can think that it is dumb luck, or Buffy, or whatever. I don’t really care what you think.”

He sipped the whiskey, savoring it. He didn’t know what to make of her in truth. Just when he was ready to count her out, she managed to surprise him. He went with instinct on this. Fear wasn’t necessarily a weakness. It demonstrated intelligence and provided adrenalin while prodding the survival instinct. The crucial thing was how well developed her survival skills were. No matter how smart she appeared to be, when it came to split second decision-making, smart didn’t count. Habit took over. He suspected that she was in the habit of believing herself to be badly over-matched. There was a degree of desperation in her maneuvering that reinforced his conclusion.

He walked over to her, running his fingers through her hair, winding the bright strands around his finger. “I’ll make a deal with you, Red,” he offered, patiently waiting until she met his eyes. He smiled, a slow, ruthless twist of his lips, blue eyes intent and amused. “I’ll make a fair trade,” he promised. “In exchange for that, for not killing your mates and turning you,” his eyebrows lifted, silently acknowledging that it had been his plan all along, “you and I are going to be lovers.”

“Lo—what?” Her nose scrunched up, and a look of disbelief flashed in her eyes. “You have got to be kidding,” she spat.

Possibly. He was throwing it out there to see what she would do with it, and possibly to make a deal, depending on what she did with it. He shook his head at his own impulsiveness. Nine times out of ten, it bit him in the ass, but the one time in ten that impulsiveness won the day, the payoff was usually worth it.

“You’re the smart one, pet. I’m giving you some bargaining room. Just a suggestion? You should take it. You can’t stop me from taking what I want, but,” he shrugged, “I’m willing to give up something for it. That is to your advantage. Otherwise, same result. Fighting isn’t going to put me off in the least, or change the outcome. In fact, it’s more likely that you’re going to get hurt. If you have to give it up, you might as well get something out of it, hmm?”

He was taunting her, Willow decided. “You aren’t serious are you? If I said yes, you would just double cross me and enjoy every minute of it, wouldn’t you?”

He chuckled. “That is an appealing notion, but . . . I’ll keep my word. You sacrifice your high morals and pretty body, and I’ll make a fair trade when the time comes. I’ve kept my end of a bargain before,” he reminded her. “I kept my deal with the Slayer.”

She pushed his hand away from her hair. It was too distracting. “Is this deal exclusive?” she asked.

He cocked his head to one side, watching her. “What do you mean?”

Color flooded her face, but she kept it together. “Is this just for you, or does it apply to anyone else?”

Enlightenment dawned. “Are we negotiating?” he prompted.

She glared at him. Oh, God, she was negotiating. She felt queasy for a moment. Then her resolve hardened. “I want to go home. I want you to leave us alone. So, if that is on the table, then yes, I guess we are.”

He licked his lower lip, his eyelids drifting down for a moment. He managed to school the satisfied smirk off his face. He nodded. “Yeah. It’s exclusive. You don’t have to let anyone else touch you.”

She thought about that for a moment, concentrating on what he said, the precise wording of it, searching for a loophole that he might exploit. She hadn’t ‘let’ anyone touch her last night, not that it had made the least difference.

“Not good enough,” she said decisively. “You have to promise me that you won’t let anyone else touch me.”

“Red,” he practically purred, amused and impressed by her quick thinking, “I didn’t know you cared.” Georgia was going to be a bit put out with him over that, he thought and then cheerfully shrugged off her probable annoyance.

“Deal,” he agreed with a curt nod.

Willow shuddered as she realized what she was agreeing to. How was she going to explain this to Oz? “Not so fast,” she snapped nervously.

She didn’t have the nerve for this. She was going to pile on rules and caveats until he backed down. “Witch? Don’t push you luck,” he warned.

Her hands had grown damp. She realized that her fingers were making impressions in the pulping paper under her hands as she gripped the book she was holding.

“This is between us,” she said. “It stays between us. No taunting Oz. No telling my friends. If you ever, and I do mean ever, tell them, I’ll . . .” she thought desperately for a threat so severe that he would take her seriously, “I’ll curse you with a soul.”

He briefly considered wrapping his fingers around her throat and throttling her. Curse him with a soul? Bloody hell. The second she was out of his control, she could do that and there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop her.

“What’s to stop you from doing that anyway?” he snarled.

Willow’s eyes widened as she realized that she had stumbled into a strategic error of vast dimension. “Uh . . . nothing, I guess,” she conceded, wincing. “I’m taking your word on faith, so it only seems fair that you do the same.”

She nodded to herself. “And, let’s think about this for a second? Who is more likely to keep their word? You? Or Me?”

He didn’t dignify that with an answer. Only Red would think that he was breaking his word by planning to kill her stupid mates and turn her after he got the Gem of Amara. He had never said that he wouldn’t do that. He had offered to trade the witch for the Gem, and he planned to keep his end of that deal. Once he had the Gem . . . well, that was different. Not part of his original plan, but it wasn’t his fault that she made herself too damned interesting to walk away from.

He turned away from her, pacing. How could he have forgotten about the curse? She had managed to re-soul Angelus, so it wasn’t a stretch to think that she could do the same to him. The idea of crawling around in guilt and self-loathing the way the Poof had made his skin crawl. It would be ‘his’ soul. The way his luck ran? He’d be buggered up with the soul of William, the bloody awful whining pathetic poet. Before Angelus was turned he had been a drunk, a womanizer, and a lay about. Not exactly a stellar example of humanity. The man Spike had been had been a weak, sniveling fool that Spike had spent a century separating himself from with a vengeance.

His eyes narrowed. She didn’t know that. He gave a short bark of a laugh. “Princess, I hate to disappoint you, but history is full of the evil deeds of the soul having. Just because Angel turned into a self flagellating do-gooder, doesn’t mean I will.”

She closed the book. “If you keep your end of the deal, that argument becomes academic, doesn’t it? Or is that what is bothering you? You don’t think that you can do it?” She smiled sourly. “After all, your impulse control issues are pretty well established.”

He acknowledged that with a crooked smile. “I can keep up my end of it,” he retorted with a derisive stare that hinted that she would cry off before they got down to doing anything worth trading for.

Lesser of two evils, Willow reminded herself. He was right about one thing. He really didn’t have to trade anything. He was more than capable of taking anything he wanted without giving up anything in exchange. Still, she felt her stomach lurch, and swallowed hard to keep from throwing up.

“It isn’t a good deal on your end,” she blurted out. “Whatever it is that you think I can do, or, know how to do, is kind of limited by the fact that I haven’t actually done it that much, if at all, assuming you want to do stuff I haven’t done, which is pretty likely since I haven’t done all that much in the first place,” she babbled.

She had a point. He had traded off taunting the Slayer and her crew about shagging their witch before killing them all in exchange for an inexperienced and congenitally up tight nineteen year old girl. Bloody hell.

“We could just go back to fair trade and never seeing each other again, which also works,” she suggested.

He finished his drink. “Doubt it, Red.” He set the glass down on the sideboard. “Impulse control issues, remember?”

“Oh . . . right,” she looked down at the floor, chewing on her lower lip. “So . . . what . . . do you want me to . . . uh,” she winced at her stammering. “Do you want to—“

“Seal the deal? Do the deed? Shag?” he supplied, enjoying her squirming.

Willow winced. This was insane. He had just started down this little conversational road on a hypothetical to torment her. He was probably enjoying this immensely. He was not serious.

“No?” she breathed, hopefully.

He let his gaze wander around the room. There was a pretty display of toys on hand, a riding crop hanging from a small hook on the wall being the tamest object at hand. He ran his finger over the finely braided leather and shrugged. He was bored.

“Nothing better to do,” he decided.

Willow’s eyes widened as she watched him. She was positive that she had not agreed to let him beat her. In fact, the whole point of this little bargain was that she wasn’t going to be beaten, wasn’t it? Otherwise, why bargain?

He turned back to her and hid a smile at her horrified expression. “Come along, pet,” he said, gesturing to the door. “If we stay here you’re likely to have an audience at some point, and I don’t think you want that.”

The riding crop stayed where it was, she saw as she rose on legs that shook. Beyond the double door was the hallway outside of the room they were sharing. The hallway wasn’t empty. Down the hall there was a housekeeping cart pushed by an older woman who looked up at them briefly before going back to work. It was a little slice of normalcy that made Willow feel surreal. Spike used the key card to unlock the door and he gave her a small push to get her moving through it. He started to shut the door, and then put the plastic ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the other side of the door before shutting it behind him.